


Unholy

by gatekeeper



Category: World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft - Various Authors
Genre: Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-14 21:59:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3427091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatekeeper/pseuds/gatekeeper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stories of the Death Kight Lithander on his various travels.  Some canon to him and some not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unholy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The garrison concept is so strange. I know if you're exalted with The Ebon Blade and have a level three garrison then you get DK guards to make sure you're not going rogue but still. Lithander isn't fit to be a commander of people that are alive.

“Commander Lithander!” a voice came, clipped and harried. Lithander recognised the shake in it others seemed to get when they were cold.

He looked down at the orc peon, pausing in rearranging the flasks in his bags so they wouldn’t shatter when he urged his deathcharger into a gallop. “What?” he asked, irritated. His voice was a deep echoing growl that, as far as he knew, had never been any different. Talking to other non-death knights always made it more obvious to himself.

“One of the peons didn’t come back from chopping wood, Commander,” the peon said, panting and holding the furs the Frostwolf clan had loaned him close. “Saggit asked if, since you’re out here, you could have a look for him. There’s too many gronnlings to cut wood safely.”

Lithander sighed deeply and straightened on his deathcharger, flipping the covers of his bags closed. “Tell Saggit I will clear out the gronnlings. If we’re going to make a fort here they’ll only get in our way.”

“Yes Commander,” the peon said, surprise in his eyes. He turned on his heel and ran back through the snow to the little camp, more importantly the fire, that they had set up.

Lithander wondered at his tone of voice, the surprise, a moment. They had with them a killing machine, and yet still they seemed surprised when he agreed to kill for them. It made him wonder if a warlock would have been more or less trusted than he.

Clutching his deathcharger's reins, Lithander steered Beloved up over the ridge and out into the sparsely wooded area around Frostwall. He could hear the Gronnlings moving about, see them through sleet that had begun to fall only barely.

He counted maybe fifteen gronnlings, but no mother along with them, and no den.

There was a shuffling beside him and Lithander looked down at the skeleton that had been by his side since shortly after he’d risen under the Lich King. She had no flesh and was draped in torn, high elven clothes. Trembling faintly, as she always did, she rotated her skull until she was looking up at Lithander.

Lithander grimaced. “Go find the Gronn den, Mother,” he ordered.

She hesitated a moment before curling her fingers and rotating her skull back to the ground, to the snow she battled to walk through without falling apart, and started walking.

Lithander watched her until she had disappeared in the sleet and snow and then turned his eye on the nearest visible gronnling. He dismounted Beloved and the mare remained where she stood slapping her tail against her rump like the cold wind actually bothered her as it bit into her and nosing at the snow playfully.

Creeping up on the beast was easy. They could hardly see any better than any other living creature here, though they didn’t seem cold at all. Lithander drew his rune blade as he approached, spread death and decay through the ground and raised an arm, called the gronnling to him. It roared and ran towards him, swept at him with a large, meaty arm filled with claws. Lithander growled, dodged to the side and then darted forward.

The creature was too large for his blade to reach its heart, but he hardly needed to reach so deep. He stuck with his blade, managed to cut through the thick hide deep enough to spill a little black blood before he dodged back and urged the wound to fester, calling on the runes tattooed into his skin and his blade. The gronnling roared and arched back, pain evident.

Lithander moved back, excitement rising, eyes glowing just a little brighter. Laughter bubbled up in his chest, spilled free.

The gronnling’s roar deepened into rage and it turned, fixing an eye on him and struck again, smacking at the ground and kicking up snow. It knocked him back, sent him back into the snow and against a rock hidden in a snowdrift.

Something like pain flared up his back, and he felt his armour dent.

An arm came down beside him, horribly close, and Lithander roared in turn, feeling his whole body flash an ice-white cold. He struck at the gronnling’s arm, cleaved through the thick hide and managed to almost sever it’s arm. A rush of well being passed into him, of something like calmness, at the utterly pained scream the gronnling gave.

Lithander pushed himself up, off the rock, gathered about him all of his unholy power he could manage and struck, jamming his blade up into the gronnling’s throat.

It choked and spilled black blood in a small river, splashing down on the snow and a panting Lithander. He screamed again and heaved the gronnling to the side, not willing to be crushed by it. It fell with a deep thud that shook the earth, and the flow of blood from it’s throat, from around his runeblade, was ceaseless, melting the snow and turning it to slush around his greaves.

It wasn’t enough.

Lithander gritted his teeth and placed a boot against the gronnling’s neck and pulled his runeblade out with a wet sucking sound. More blood spilled.

He felt calmer, but it wasn’t enough. He would need to kill another. And fix his armour after.

Beloved remained waiting calmly where he’d left her, and Mother was no where to be seen, but he could see and hear other gronnlings. Fourteen of them now, he supposed.

He looked back down at the gronnling he’d just killed extended a hand, willed it to decay rapidly, leaving only a skeleton and black sludge and ice all around it. Then he moved on to the next, blue lips curved into something like a smile.

  
  
  
  


Mother returned to him after he’d killed the last gronnling that had been pawing at the body of the missing peon near a boarded up mineshaft. The creaking of her bones alerted him that she was there before he turned to see her. She paused briefly as he turned, then lifted a hand and gestured at her skull with a finger.

Lithander looked down at himself. The gronnling blood, black as soil, was everywhere. He would have been dripping with it if it weren’t so cold. He went to frown and felt the frozen blood on his fake crack and fall. “Perhaps a break, yes,” he said, moving over to her.

He knelt in the clean snow and stabbed his blade down into the earth, let it stand there while he pulled his gauntlets off and buried his bare hands into the snow, then cleaned his face with it best he could. The snow came away black, chipped away on his skin in a thin film. He was worried it would take a chunk of his face with it.

“Your work is impressive,” came a deep voice. It seemed sombre.

Lithander sighed and raised his head, looked over at Thrall. He didn’t remember him having a shaved head, but it had happened at some point. The peons usually had shaved heads, and so if Thrall was trying to make a point of it, it was lost on him. He’d never cared for the orcs, for all the Sin’dorei were apparently allied with them.

Why he didn’t like them he couldn’t remember, like he couldn’t remember a lot of things before he’d been been raised.

He was Sin’dorei and the first thing he’d raised after his training had been his own mother, but past that, he remembered very little. It had been years since the Lich King’s fall and the memories had still not returned, nor had a great deal of his emotions. If he’d ever had them.

He dropped his hands and rose. Uninterested in the orc as he was, the Ebon Blade were to be helpful and loyal. He’d been sent to aid Khadgar and Thrall, and so he would. Likely they hadn’t intended it to go this far without contact, without the chance to send another knight to keep an eye on him, one more in control of their sensibilities and sense of self.

“It gets the job done,” Lithander said, bending a moment to pick up his gauntlets and slide them onto his hands once more. He spent a moment working his fingers open and closed, watching ice fall from them.

“That it does,” Thrall said, face rather blank. If he was at all affected by the cold he didn’t show it. His eyes were instead on the dead orc behind him.

Lithander chuckled a little. They couldn’t have been on more opposite sides if not for their treaties. His unholy aura obviously affected Thrall, connected as he was to the elements. People weren’t elements, per se, but he still had ice in his blood and his body and magics defied arcane magic and other more well known magic practices.

He could spread blight across the soil as well. Death and decay reached all.

“Come to find the den, then?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

Thrall had the grace to look only mildly disturbed. “I will take the body of the peon back to camp, and we’ll give him a proper burial,” he said, shifting to walk around Lithander. He made his way to the battered body of the small peon the gronnling had been playing with and knelt by him, then bowed his head a moment. If he said a prayer or the like Lithander didn’t hear it.

Lithander watched him a moment before looking over at the skeleton that had been waiting by his side, trembling almost unnoticably for once. “Well?” he asked.

Mother pointed north-east. Her tracks through the snow hadn’t completely covered over just yet.

“Hmn.”

He whistled and Beloved came to him, working her way through the snow with ease, the rune-magic that fortified her lower legs melting the snow as she moved. Once she was close Lithander took hold of her reins and the saddle, placed a boot in a stirrup and hauled himself up. Nudging Beloved over to his rune blade, Lithander pulled it from the earth and swung it over his shoulder.

“Thank you,” Thrall said, from where he stood, fallen peon draped in his arms.

Lithander looked over at him, surprised, white-hair falling around him as the wind finally began to die down. “For what?”

“For not raising him again,” Thrall said, eyes on Lithander.

The unholy death knights were never treated as well as their blood and frost brothers, Lithander had noted. Too much like the Lich King, he supposed. They all had the power to raise the dead, but none to the degree those who had chosen to learn from the unholy. The unholy could make even living beings rott. He imagined it much more painful to living beings than those already dead.

Even so he didn’t usually associate with other living beings. Why the Highlord had sent him through the Dark Portal was a mystery. He was also surprised he had no watchers sent from the Highlord to be sure he remained loyal.

They will come, he thought. Koltira would be more suited, for all he hated interacting with people.

“My superiors would look down on it,” Lithander said, tone even.

Thrall stared at Lithander a while longer and then nodded. “I imagine they would,” he said, and sighed. There was patience and understanding there and why was beyond Lithander. “Thank you all the same. I know it is against your nature.”

Beloved’s nicker cut through the air and he patted the meat of her neck and shoulder. Lithander stared blankly at Thrall a moment, before speaking again. “I’ll be at the den figuring out how to kill a gronn if you need me.”

“Skogg,” Thrall said. “Her name is Skogg. If you give me some time I will come and aid you.”

“As you please,” Lithander said, nudging Beloved along. If the gronn managed to kill him, even despite his apparently inbuilt survival instinct, Lithander would consider it a good death. He’d rested enough that he’d be more than a challenge for her now.

Mother paused to give something of a bow to Thrall before shambling after Lithander. 


End file.
